Artist/Director/Concept/Design: Marina Abramovic
Choreographer: Blenard Azizaj
This is it. This is what we’ve been waiting for at Aviva Studios. The Godmother of Performance Art (a title she can’t shake – and why should she?) has been let loose in the Warehouse, the venue’s vast performance space. She’s already calling Balkan Erotic Epic “the most ambitious work in my career” and she’s not wrong. This is a creative experience that matches the original ambition of the building.
Abramovic’s first thirty years were spent in her native Serbia and Croatia and she’s never lost her Slavic sensibilities. Balkan Erotic Epic is something of an outpouring of love for her homeland, despite her time there sometimes being far from happy. The show’s themes are all the things you don’t bring up in polite conversation – death, sex, politics, religion – all wrapped up in the drama and weirdness of ancient Slavic rituals.
Balkan Erotic Epic is a four-hour durational performance in which the audience is invited to wander in and out of thirteen separate scenes. Starting in the Social (the bar), Abramovic, demure in her black dress and headscarf, invites us to follow a funeral procession for Tito, leader of Communist Yugoslavia who ruled as President for 35 years. The audience, pre-show drinks in hand, isn’t quite ready for this. What should be a slow and theatrical ascent turns in to a bit of a scrum to empty glasses and get upstairs. People resume their conversations, but they begin to die away as the Warehouse doors open on a huge screen showing women performing a mourning ritual, and, in front of the screen, a gloriously majestic woman, swathed in a billowing black gown, sitting on a high-backed chair.
Sharing too much detail here of the individual performances would really spoil the experience, but it’s safe to say you’ll see some things you’ve never seen before, you’ll find some of it moving and sad, some of it funny and uplifting, some of it challenging, and some of it just strange. If nudity isn’t your thing this probably isn’t the show for you, but, as with all Abramovic’s work, there’s a visceral honesty in it all, humanity writ large.
For those who know previous work, there’s subtle glimpses of old performances – performers writing with skeletons, the crucified body, mannequins lying on tall plinths – but these echoes are completely integrated into the piece and given new resonance. There’s lots of new ideas here too, not least in the scale of some of the scenes, with over 70 live performers including dancers, musicians and singers. Costuming them all has been quite a task too, with some extraordinary traditional and ritual costumes by Roksanda Ilincic.
The decision to use one huge space for all the scenes, and the logistics to make this work, is a triumph. The set design (Anna Schöttl) balances smaller, more intimate spaces with vast open areas, huge projection screens with dark corners. Lighting by Urs Schönebaum adds to this clever zoning. Together they create a dreamlike landscape, a playground for Abramovic’s brilliant imagination. One moment you’re engrossed in two performers silently playing out an intimate pre-wedding ritual, then there’s a noisy dance going on or animalistic screams from a group of women ‘scaring the gods in to stopping the rain’, then a gorgeous operatic voice rings out. Sometimes all the sounds collide, or harmonise, in a wholly unexpected way.
As the performances draw to a close, and each distinctive sound we’ve come to recognise dies away, there’s a glorious hush around the room. It’s all done before you know it (phones are locked away so only those with watches have really been aware the time) and it’s like waking from a strange, all-embracing dream. Finally, in the quiet, to a lone voice, the artist dances.
Runs until 19 October 2025
